Tags
by makesometime
Summary: Holos on dog tags - imagine what you could find. Ficlet set during 1x06, Bylaw.


Alicia somewhat dreaded the question she knew he was going to ask.

"You have any pictures on your tags?" Jim ventured, before they were even fully up the steps out of the bar.

"I do." She said, a little surprised by her own easy capitulation to answering him. "My company in Somalia. Most of them are gone now."

She trailed off, affecting an air of repressed sadness and regret. Her words aren't a lie - they are gone, some of them she misses every damn day - but she processed that emotional trauma many years ago. However, she hadn't gone through years of military training without learning how to avoid awkward conversations and her words were enough to stop Shannon's line of questioning before it really began, his quiet apology signalling the subject has been dropped.

As they made their way toward the hospital, she let her mind wander to the pictures she kept. She hadn't needed them as much recently, life for her had been somewhat calmer and the only time she'd had to break them out in the previous few months was during her vigil by Taylor's bedside the night she shot him.

The first is of her full company on their first day out, an insistence from the commanding officer they were all slightly terrified of. The man himself stood in the middle of the group, proud overseer of his hand-picked group of soldiers, both experienced and raw. Alicia stood a few people down the line from him, sandwiched between two of the men who'd been like brothers to her in the months previous. It would be the last time she'd find herself so far away from Taylor for a very long time. The FNGs crouched in the front, each one grinning at the camera with barely suppressed glee at finally seeing some combat.

In her second picture, most of them were gone. The few that remained gave the camera the same dead-eyed stare as the rest of their more experienced comrades; the war had torn the life from them, figuratively if not literally. Taylor was once again in the middle, but there was a genuine smile on his face, as there was on hers. She stood beside him now, and a second before the picture was taken he had slung an arm around her neck, throwing her off balance and crashing into him with a surprised laugh. The picture captured a joy that would seem so distant only a few weeks later, when she was medevaced from the middle of the battlefield.

She thought (or maybe just assumed) that no one would ever have cause to pry more than that should her tags ever temporarily fall out of her possession. Those two pictures painted enough of a story to negate the need to look further.

That certainty was why she allowed the third picture. It was a cropped and zoomed in copy of one taken at the same time as the second, but an all important moment later.

After stumbling she'd looked up at him with the intention of scolding him lightly, only to find him already looking down at her with an expression of amused fondness that knocked the wind out of her. The photographer had caught her stunned reaction and Taylor's mischief and every time she looked at it she was instantly back there, in his arms, coming to the horrifying conclusion that she was in love with her married commanding officer.

She remembered sneaking onto the computer system to get at that picture, intending to wipe all evidence from the network as easily as her sharp words had wiped the smirk off the photographer's face when he'd showed the original to her. Yet her fingers had cropped and resized it before she realised and then it was there, buried on her tags and removed from all other record forever.

She'd wondered many times over the intervening years if she would have got through her arduous recovery without that picture. Possibly not. Another instance of Nathaniel Taylor saving her without even knowing it.

Shannon led the way through the hospital entrance before long, cutting her musings short. Her tags bounced against her chest as she walked through after him, their familiar weight a comfort as ever.

In her more melancholy moments she often hoped, should the day ever come when Terra Nova finally caught up with her, that Nathaniel would be the one to review her personal effects. Then perhaps he'd look at her tags and see - finally, truly, _see_ - just how much he'd always meant to her.


End file.
